Murder Club: A true story of hate and reconciliation

(Author’s note: By popular demand, here’s the Murder Club in its entirety.)

Friday night

March 1, 1996

Dear Kay,

I’m in trouble. Big trouble. Anger. Much anger. So much anger that I’m losing the little bit of control and mental stability that I have left. I think I’ve always known that it would eventually come down to this. …

Pam Berry

A police scanner buzzed in a newsroom in Jackson, Mississippi, a capital city bursting with New South pride and Old South prejudice, doing its best to conceal the latter. It was a Friday evening, April 12, 1996, and many reporters were finishing their stories, ready for the weekend. For Pam Berry, the workday was an hour and a half old because she was covering cops. At age twenty-three, she was only the second African-American police reporter for The Clarion-Ledger, a medium-sized newspaper so horribly racist in the 1960s that her father cursed it along with others in the black community and called it the “Klan-Ledger.” Since childhood, she had watched the paper change, becoming more racially sensitive. She dreamed of reporting at the publication because she loved writing and thought the life of a journalist seemed full of adventure. In her teenage years, Pam cruised by the grungy granite newspaper building with her friends and swore to them she would work there one day. They laughed.

As she approached adulthood, her dad talked often of the Old South, the way things had been for him and other black Mississippians before she was born — separate seating, separate schools, even separate bathrooms labeled “Colored” and “White.” He had once manicured the lawn of former Governor Ross Barnett and promptly left when Barnett began a tirade. Pam believed those days of apartheid belonged in a museum somewhere because she was living in the New South, a place no longer tolerant of prejudice, peonage and the Ku Klux Klan. Why, Mississippi has more black elected officials than any other state.

Her shy nature and slight stature contrasted sharply with fellow police reporter Jay Hughes, who resembled a cross between a “good ol’ boy” and a defensive tackle. Jay had introduced her to police reporting nearly two years earlier. He proved a good guide since he was already a member of “the murder club,” a tight-knit group of veteran cops, paramedics and others who routinely dealt with death and disliked outsiders. The nearly all-male club eventually welcomed Pam, but not until she passed her initiation. Coaxing her into a crime lab where antiseptic tried to cloak the stench of death, cops made her stare at slides of death scenes, including a homeless man decapitated by a train. They chuckled, waiting, believing she would get sick. She hardly flinched.

Working the police beat had brought her face to face with dozens of killings, so many they blurred into a bad home movie — except one. On Super Bowl Sunday, she arrived at a house to see a body blanketed with a white sheet, blood soaking through. She pieced together the story: A newlywed her age had asked teenagers to move out of the street so she could drive to the grocery store. Returning with Popsicles and cigarettes for her family, she saw the same teenagers, one of them a scrawny fourteen-year-old brandishing a gun. “Whatcha gonna do?” she asked. “Shoot me in the back?” “Yeah, bitch,” the boy replied and fired the pistol. Pam watched the newlywed’s mother reach toward the sheet and scream. Tears welled in Pam’s eyes. She stopped writing and breathed deeply. How many times have I asked kids to move out of the way?

Inside the newsroom, Pam heard an out-of-breath cop scream, “I got a man who’s down. I can’t get to him.”

She grabbed her scanner and dashed down the stairs. Passing through the lobby, she saw her best friend, Genifer Freeman, with whom she shared lunch and laughter each day.

Although she was white, Genifer became more upset about racism than Pam. After Pam’s engagement, the two went shopping for china patterns at a department store. A white clerk there refused to speak to Pam, turning instead to Genifer, who rebuked the clerk and reminded her Pam was the bride.

At the newspaper office, Pam ran for the front door.

“Where you going?” Genifer asked.

“Shooting,” Pam replied.

“You be careful.”

“I will. I will.”

Pam hopped in her gray Nissan and headed toward the scene. She thought nothing of the fact that her best friend was white, believing the subject of race haunted too many people. She discounted problems associated with prejudice, believing many black leaders exaggerated such woes. When she happened to read remarks by white supremacists, she often laughed at their words. Before the day ended, her beliefs would be challenged, in about the time it takes to fire a machine gun.

* * * * * * * * *

Jay Hughes stirred the ground beef sizzling in a skillet, steam filling his small kitchen. A night of Hamburger Helper. He preferred grilling a rib-eye steak on weekends, but tonight he needed to eat quickly so he could run an errand.

On his bedroom floor, his Levis lay crumpled, his left front pocket bearing a ringed outline where he kept his can of snuff. The only thing Jay loved more than Copenhagen was the adrenaline he got from an exciting story. In covering members of the murder club, he often patrolled the crime-ridden neighborhoods, waiting for a homicide call on the scanner, sometimes beating an ambulance to the scene. He had been shot at three times, once at such close range he was amazed the gunman missed. One night to get a story, he dozed several dozen yards from a derailment that caused a chemical spill in downtown Jackson. An official warned him that if the train blew up, he’d be vaporized. He grunted, burrowed beneath his blanket and went to sleep.

Jay admired Pam’s spunk, but initially questioned how well she would handle her job as a police reporter. The editors wanted Jay to mentor Pam. He was reluctant. He’d been able to improve relations with the cops and the last thing he wanted was some rookie screwing up all his hard work. He also worried about her gender because the murder club, after all, was nearly all male. “Listen,” he told her, “don’t take this wrong, but as a woman, a lot of these guys are going to give you sh– just to see what your reaction is. Don’t give them the satisfaction.” She didn’t. When cops denigrated her, Pam insulted them right back. Jay relished his big brother role, watching her bloom into a talented reporter. He went along when she covered her first homicide in which a man shot his brother because he wouldn’t loan him five bucks. She handled it like a pro.

Sniper fire from an abandoned restaurant in south Jackson prompts people to seek safety.

“There’s somebody out here firing a machine gun. People are pinned down all over the place. I can see some cops pinned down behind their car.”

A sniper was shooting from an abandoned PoFolks Restaurant two blocks south of U.S. 80 and less than a block south of the Interstate 20 overpass on Ellis Avenue, a white part of south Jackson that was now mostly black. The restaurant nestled into a hill, the site of a Civil War battle.

Pam told Jay she could make out the restaurant from where she was standing in a parking lot outside a Best Western motel. Her voice quickened as she described a television cameraman crawling on his belly underneath the overpass. “These people are nuts. Why are they trying to get that close?”

Jay was pulling on his Levis over his boxer shorts as he listened to her speak above the incessant gunfire. Shots stopped momentarily before resuming. Just long enough to punch out an empty clip and stick in a new one.

“God, where are you?” Jay asked.

“I’m at Ellis and 80.”

Bullets whined as they ricocheted near her.

“Jay, there’s—”

Pfifft! Jay swore it was the same noise he had heard in the woods when he shot a whitetail deer at close range, the unforgettable sound of a bullet striking flesh. He strained to listen more closely.

“Pam, are you OK? Are you OK? Pam? Pam!”

* * * * * * * * *

Pam Berry

A sticky stream oozed down the back of Pam’s silk shirt. She wanted to touch the wound, to see how bad it was, but she was afraid she might panic. Blood dripped from her shirt onto the tops of her white sneakers.

Moments before, she heard what sounded like firecrackers. She even noticed puffs of smoke coming up from the ground amidst the cool breeze. She realized too late that the smoke had come from bullets striking the ground.

She stood quietly while she listened to Jay’s cries. She swallowed hard, not certain she could speak. “I’ve-I’ve been hit.”

“What? What?”

“I’ve been hit, Jay. Send an ambulance to the Best Western on Ellis.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Jay dialed 911, gave directions to the motel and called The Clarion-Ledger newsroom. Metro Editor Dan Davis answered. Soft-spoken, unflappable, he was the perfect person in charge of covering a disaster.

Dan Davis

“Dan, Pam’s been shot.”

“What?”

“Pam’s been shot.”

“What do you mean she’s been shot?”

“She’s been hit by a bullet.”

Jay dialed 911 again. That ambulance better get out there damn quick. He threw down the telephone and put his Mississippi Sportswriters Association cap on backwards. He was heading out the door when the phone rang. It was Dan.

“We need you to go out there.”

Jay’s Ford Bronco II hit 75 mph as he swerved in front of other cars, ran red lights and cut trenches through a corner of a family’s lawn. He thought about the loaded .40-caliber pistol he kept under his seat. I oughta drive up to PoFolks and empty all 11 shots into this stupid sonovabitch.

* * * * * * * *

Pam staggered toward a lady in a dark red shirt. “Can you help me? I’ve-I’ve been shot, ma’am.”

The woman saw that Pam’s blood-drenched shirt resembled her own in color and stumbled backwards. Pam lurched toward the motel entrance where a woman identifying herself as a nurse came up to her. “Get me some towels!” the nurse snapped to some motel employees.

Pam was guided to the motel’s empty conference room, where stacks of chairs rested against the wall. She observed a huge white man, whose bushy gray hair hung past his shoulders, while the top of his head was bald. He hoisted his tight jeans underneath his sagging belly, picked up Pam’s screeching police scanner and asked, “Want me to turn this off?”

“No, please don’t. I want to be able to hear when the ambulance comes.”

Pam noticed a slim black man enter the room. He had a miniature Afro and appeared about her age. She glanced at his blue-collared work shirt, but couldn’t read his name stitched in red when he spoke. “I got a truck. I can take you to the hospital right now.”

“No,” the nurse replied, “the ambulance will be here any second.”

Blood gushed from Pam’s neck as she sat in a cheap plastic conference chair. The nurse replaced a set of bloody towels with new ones. “I think the bullet may have hit the main vein.”

She pressed with both hands, trying to stop the bleeding. Pam faded toward unconsciousness. I’m dying.

She gestured weakly toward the nurse. “Don’t push so hard. I can’t breathe.”

The nurse barked at Pam to get off the chair and lie down on the conference room’s crimson carpet.Why can’t the nurse stop her blood from flowing?

Fifteen minutes had passed. What’s taking the ambulance so long? Oh, no, the roadblock. The scanner traffic confirmed her fear: The ambulance that’s supposed to take me to the hospital can’t even get here.

She glared at the bald man, who was holding her reporter’s notepad. “Anyone you want me to call?”

“Yes, my parents and my husband.” She remembered the squabble she’d had that morning with her husband, Steven. What a lousy day to pick a fight. Now she couldn’t remember why they had argued in the first place.

She turned to the man with the Afro. “I want you to pass on a message. If I don’t make it, tell my husband that I love him.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Promise me—”

“Don’t say that.”

“Promise me you’ll tell him that.”

The man with the Afro nodded. “I promise.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Jay saw a deputy standing in the street near the Best Western when the officer motioned for him to stop. Jay punched the accelerator. The deputy leaped back and yelled, “Go ahead and get yourself shot.”

He had barely parked his Bronco when paramedics carried Pam toward the rear door of an ambulance. Blood soaked her silk shirt. An oxygen mask covered her face. He saw Pam’s husband, Steven, walking with her. Thank God he got here. The rear door closed with Pam inside. Worried he might never see her again, he grabbed a paramedic by the side door and threw him several feet away. Jay climbed into the ambulance, grabbed her hand and peered into her eyes. “Pam, you’re going to be fine,” he said, believing those words less than any he had ever spoken.

When the driver entered the van, Jay stepped out of the ambulance, which sped away. He stood staring for a minute or two, listening as the sirens receded in the distance.

* * * * * * * * * *

Pam Berry

Pam gazed at the ambulance’s silver walls and a valve where the paramedic had plugged in her oxygen tank. She surveyed the face of her husband, Steven. His empty eyes seemed as distant as heaven itself. His parents had died before he celebrated his eighth birthday. Four years ago, his brother had been shot and killed after he broke up a couple’s fight in a nightclub. He’d told Pam he felt cursed because everyone close to him seemed to die. What is he thinking now?

She squeezed his hand harder in hopes he would understand. She spoke, her voice muffled by her oxygen mask. “I’m going to be OK.” As they sped down the streets, she dreamed of an eagle, bending her wings in the breeze, flying upward, soaring above a peaceful waterfall.

When the paramedics began to unload Pam at the hospital, she saw her parents standing outside the ambulance. There was Mom, who was overly emotional in almost every situation. How would she react? And what about Dad, who suffered a recent stroke? He had big dreams of big money for her, wanting her to work as an aeronautical engineer. She initially went along with his wishes and wrote a check for engineering school. She never mailed it, majoring instead in journalism.

As the paramedics hustled Pam toward the emergency room, Mom started screaming. She leaped toward the stretcher, trying to grab Pam. Steven stepped in front of Mom, blocking her like an offensive lineman. His action prevented them all from sprawling onto the asphalt.

Inside the emergency room, doctors and nurses ripped Pam’s clothes from her body. She moved a left hand to cover her breasts and a right hand to cover her pubic hair.

Needles stuck her in each arm and leg.

She jerked her arms in pain, distracted from thoughts of decency. “Ow-Ow-Ow-Ow!”

Doctors were checking to see if the gunshot had caused any paralysis. She begged, “Oh, please, I feel everything!”

* * * * * * * * *

Jay heard a familiar sound reverberate — gunshots. There was still a story to cover. He put Pam’s cellular phone in the pocket of his faded green paisley shirt and scaled a six-foot fence behind the Best Western. A deputy yelled at him to stop. He continued on, ducking to avoid possible gunfire. Soon he was panting, half hidden by the concrete pillars of the underpass. He heard the gunman fire in the other direction and darted across Ellis Avenue, shielding himself behind another pillar. He then sprinted fifteen feet forward and dove into a ditch. Peeking over the top, he noticed firemen and policemen crouched behind their vehicles. More than a dozen cars were abandoned on the street, some with their doors open — just like one of those end-of-the-world movies.

The abandoned PoFolks restaurant goes up in flames.

Jay noticed the people hiding in the ditch. A mother lay on top of her daughter, shielding her from possible gunfire. Another woman sobbed, face down in the ditch. He listened more closely. The shots had stopped. Is the guy reloading? He looked up and saw the restaurant ringed in flames and spewing black smoke, a scene reminiscent of what happened in Waco three years ago.

Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! His Mom and Dad were paging him. He pulled the cell phone from his pocket. It was smeared with Pam’s blood. Did she make it to the hospital? Is she alive?

“I don’t know. She didn’t look very good when they put her in the ambulance.”

“The phone’s been ringing off the hook. They said on TV that a Clarion-Ledgerreporter had been shot, but they didn’t give a name until just a minute ago. I’ve been telling everybody it was your day off, so I didn’t think it was you. Where are you?”

“I’m out here.”

“Where’s out here?”

“I’m in a ditch about sixty yards from the restaurant.”

Hundreds of shots went off at once at PoFolks. Flames must be setting off other rounds of ammunition.Mom heard the gunfire. “You need to go home right now,” she said, employing the same tone she had when he climbed to the top of his grandfather’s pecan tree at age ten.

“They don’t pay me to go home, Mom.”

* * * * * * * * *

The nurse handed Pam a clipboard with a form on it. “Sign it.”

Pam knew the form would permit her to go into surgery. She clasped the ballpoint pen in her left hand but had trouble gripping it. The signals from her brain weren’t working.

She felt herself sinking into the stretcher below her. Am I dying?

“Just sign,” the nurse said.

Pam moved the pen toward the clipboard and awkwardly scratched a blue mark.

As the sky darkened with smoke, Jay turned around to see men and women craning their necks from the ditch like curious birds. The mother Jay had noticed earlier continued to hover over her daughter. Finally, a police officer approached her. “Ma’am, it’s OK to go.”

“No, no, no.”

D.Q. Holifield

She stayed there trembling, unable to move for another hour.

Jay crept closer to the restaurant and stood behind a fire truck, which sprayed streams of water into the inferno.

Police Chief Robert Johnson approached Jay. The small-mustached police chief had a calm, deliberative demeanor that made him a favorite among officers, even those in the murder club. Jay explained that he had parked his car at the Best Western.

Johnson motioned up the street. “I heard somebody got hit up there.”

“Chief, it was Pam.”

Johnson’s brown eyes dilated. “Is she OK?”

“I don’t know.”

Jay walked toward the armored SWAT truck, which had picked up one of the gunman’s victims, a black man shot dozens of times in front of PoFolks. The coroner was examining the dead man’s wounds. When the coroner was finished, Jay approached him and asked for a ride back to his Bronco. The coroner agreed. On the way, Jay asked for the dead man’s name. The coroner handed him the driver’s license, which read, “D.Q. Holifield.” Jay gazed at the fifty-one-year-old man’s face and wondered about another name — Pam Berry.

* * * * * * * * *

Pam’s gurney passed between family members lining each side of the hallway outside the surgery suite. Pain stabbed her in the neck.Guess surgery is over. “I’m OK,” she told relatives. She wasn’t so sure.

Pam Berry

An attendant wheeled her into a large recovery room, where a nurse jerked flimsy green curtains around her makeshift bed. In a few moments, a man who looked like Santa Claus without a beard peeked inside. “Hey, kiddo.” It was Mr. Patrick, her high school computer teacher.

He entered and squeezed her right hand, which held an IV drip.

She smiled. She had long ago developed a bond with Mr. Patrick. One day while she’d been typing at a computer, she turned to see him flailing his arms, but saying nothing. He was choking. Pam grabbed him from behind, awkwardly performing the Heimlich maneuver she had learned a few summers before. She cried as she yanked a chair into his stomach. On her fifth pull, a piece of corn bread flew from his mouth, and he began to breathe.

Mr. Patrick stood over Pam’s hospital bed, holding a Bible in his left hand. “Can I pray with you?”

Jay smelled gunpowder and gasoline as police officers dug through charred wood and rubble. A burned body lay alongside a Ruger .357. Moron must have shot himself before the flames could get to him. The cops pulled out more than a dozen automatic weapons and several thousand rounds of ammunition — enough for the sniper to have fired for a week. He must have accidentally caught the building on fire since he had so much firepower left. Probably wanted to take a lot more people with him, maybe even a bunch of cops. “Suicide by police” is what the cops call it.

Jay phoned the newspaper office. Another reporter had run the license tag number on the pickup truck behind PoFolks, presumably the gunman’s vehicle. Jay walked up to police detectives at the scene. “This guy named Larry Shoemake?”

They nodded their heads.

Returning to the newsroom about midnight, Jay sat down at his desk. He had already written one story and had dictated other information all night to other journalists. Now he read each report to double-check the information. The sniper had shot eight people, all black. At least one was dead. He didn’t know the status of the other seven, including Pam.

An editor came over to his desk and told him that Pam was out of surgery at the hospital. “The doctor says she’s going to be OK.”

Jay laid his head in his arms on his cold charcoal desk and felt much lighter. He muttered a silent prayer over and over again, “Thank you, God.”

* * * * * * * * *

By 1 a.m., Pam’s hospital room was packed with eight aunts, three uncles, her grandmother, her husband, her friends, her cousins, and Mom and Dad. A voice echoed outside her room, slightly louder than her relatives, who had been murmuring about her condition.

Pam Berry in hospital

A moment later, a faded paisley shirt waded through the crowd amid a strange silence. It was Jay.

She smiled at him. He walked to her bed, leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. Her smile broadened into a grin.

He reached towards her bandaged neck, pretending to put her in a mock chokehold. “I thought I taught you to duck.”

Pam beamed, happier to see him than she had been some of her relatives.

She spoke slowly, tiredly, and introduced Jay to her family. They chatted a little longer, and he left. She gulped a handful of painkillers and succumbed to slumber, her questions about Larry Shoemake waiting another day.

* * * * * * * *

In the days that followed, Jay learned more about Larry Shoemake. He was well educated and had once worked as a camera operator for the educational television station in Jackson. For many years, psychologists presumed that increased levels of education meant decreased levels of prejudice. More recent research has shown that high school and college graduates can hold just as many bigoted views as those less educated.

Larry Shoemake

An only son, Shoemake seemed full of potential, filling his head with books while classmates competed in sports. His sister took after the doting mother he adored, but he mirrored his father, a gregarious Greyhound bus driver. The two rarely got along, and a week before Christmas 1986, Shoemake’s father committed suicide.

Before graduating from high school in 1961, Shoemake enlisted in the Army and fought in the Vietnam War. The violence of the conflict spilled over into his marriage. He repeatedly beat his wife, who divorced him after he used her head to knock a hole in the wall. His next two marriages dissolved almost as quickly.

He dumped bosses more quickly than spouses and had spent most of his recent years unemployed. His third wife, Donna, said he would occasionally brighten when he saw a television documentary he had photographed.

Larry Shoemake

Shoemake managed to snag a role as an extra in the 1988 movie, Mississippi Burning, carrying the bodies of the three slain civil rights workers. It was his way, as Donna put it, of trying to leave his mark on history.

After Donna divorced him, he moved in with his mother, who cooked and cleaned for him. At her 1994 funeral, he wept bitterly and later spoke of suicide. “Unless I get killed by an automobile, I’ll choose my way out,” he vowed to relatives.

By the time police finished collecting dozens of guns, knives and grenades that Shoemake had amassed, they figured that he could have outfitted half a platoon. Such an arsenal would have cost $50,000 — far from affordable for a man without a job.

His motivations became clearer with each item police pulled from his house. Authorities found a Nazi flag, a skull-and-crossbones flag and a Confederate flag. They also located white supremacist literature, a black leather Bible, a “shrine” Shoemake had constructed to commemorate those who died in Waco in 1993 and Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf, which concluded that “blood sin and desecration of the race are the original sin in this world . . . , (and) by defending myself against the Jew I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

Mein Kampf, the Bible, a pamphlet on tracer bullets and other items found inside Larry Shoemake's house.

After anti-government extremists blew up a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, Jay began to collect their propaganda. He had scoffed at their literature as nothing more than a combination of right-wing paranoia and anachronistic bullshit left over by the Ku Klux Klan. Now he re-read their pamphlets. They claimed there was an international conspiracy dedicated to overthrowing the United States and establishing a one-world government. They claimed hundreds of thousands of United Nations troops were stationed inside America, awaiting orders to attack. They claimed these foreign troops would be guided on their journey by the reflective markers on the backs of road signs and that all known American “patriots” would be imprisoned beneath the Denver International Airport. Much of the propaganda invoked the name of God, claiming Africans were soulless animals and Jews were Satan’s offspring, both bent on creating and controlling this demonic worldwide government. This sounds just like the Nazis in Germany.

Jay learned that such radical views were more widespread than he thought. In a Gallup poll, twelve million Americans supported an armed rebellion against the federal government — eight times higher than the combined forces of the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force.

The newspaper, it seemed, contained a different story every week, detailing some new threat or violence. Extremists robbed banks. They printed counterfeit money. They bombed abortion clinics and newspapers. They tried to take over American military bases. They collected vials of anthrax and bubonic plague germs, prompting FBI investigations of threats against water systems in major U.S. cities.

It seemed no coincidence to Jay that anti-government extremism was surging at the same time that communism was waning. America had won the Cold War but lost an enemy. A classic study of the 1950s, the “Robbers Cave Experiment,” concluded that conflicts between two groups of boys at an Oklahoma camp diminished when a common enemy or common threat was introduced. With no such outside threat, the groups warred against one another, resorting to negative stereotypes, insults and even violence.

He learned that Shoemake’s ex-wife said that her former husband was never the same after he read The Turner Diaries, a fictional story of whites winning a race war that has sold about 250,000 copies — enough to classify it as a major best seller. Several years after its 1978 debut, the book prompted a racist group known as “The Order” to assassinate a Jewish talk show host, execute a “too-talkative” member and pull off $4 million in armored-car heists. The book apparently inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma, killing 168 and injuring more than 500.

At 9:15 a.m. yesterday morning our bomb went off in the FBI’s national headquarters building . . . the damage is immense . . . we gaped with a mixture of horror and elation at the devastation . . .

All day yesterday and most of today we watched the TV coverage of rescue crews bringing the dead and injured out of the building . . .. There is no way we can destroy the System without hurting many thousands of innocent people — no way. It is a cancer too deeply rooted in our flesh. And if we don’t destroy the System before it destroys us — if we don’t cut this cancer out of our living flesh — our whole race will die.

Jay pored over each of Shoemake’s notes, which made it obvious that the gunman believed in a war against the government, specifically a race war. Jay thought of what one of Shoemake’s neighbors had said about seeing some funny looking fellows entering the gunman’s home. Could Shoemake and his friends have been plotting a race war? Had they formed a different kind of murder club?

Goose bumps popped up on Jay’s arms. This guy meant what he said. He wasn’t just blowing steam. He wasn’t just a benign racist. Maybe that’s it—there is no such thing as a benign racist.

He read the final letters written by Shoemake to a woman identified only by her first name:

. . . I’m sliding down and the farther I slide the faster I slide, and there’s no brush or tree limbs or rocks or anything I can grab and stop the slide and hold on to. I’ve been sliding for a long time and I’m getting close to the bottom and when I hit it will be a great relief for me. The sudden stop won’t hurt.

. . . Black is the problem. Its in their genes . . .. The bottom line is: Separation or annihilation.

I think I’m about to run out of ink. That’s not the only thing that’s running out . . ..

I must go now and explore another planet, because I don’t like this one anymore.

Love,

Larry

* * * * * * *

A day after Pam was shot, she heard a knock at the door of her hospital room. Jay entered and shared what he had found out so far about Shoemake, his background, his white supremacist beliefs, his notes about a race war.

Her body sank into her hospital bed. On any other day, her journalistic curiosity would have prompted her to pump him for information. She sat stoically, sickened by the thought that she was the victim of someone else’s hate.

She had often ignored racism, even when she heard screaming voices on the public access channel. The times she did notice, she snickered at the ridiculousness of one group of people asserting their superiority over others.

Shoemake’s shooting spree made her realize that the monster of hate was outside the television studio, skulking in the shadows and stalking new victims. How could I have been so naive?

The more she thought about what happened to her, the more she realized that the only way to fight the creature was to make race relations a top priority. If prejudice can breed undetected, how can I be sure that the people aren’t hiding that growth in their souls? For that matter, how can I be certain I’m not hiding hate in my own heart?

Feelings of betrayal swelled in her. She had always trusted those around her, regardless of skin color. Now she could no longer look at whites the same way, even her best friend, Genifer, who had rushed to the hospital after she was shot. Pam grew uncomfortable with the idea of resuming her daily lunches with Genifer. Is there something in her behavior, some hint of racism I’ve failed to detect?

Pam stared at Jay. If there were any doubt about his feelings toward her, it was answered when he climbed into the ambulance. Shoemake’s violence, aimed at tearing apart the races, had brought them closer together. She studied Jay’s face, filled with dozens of lines, each digging in deeply. She saw pain, despair and disgust. He appeared just as appalled as she felt. He looks like he’s been betrayed, too.

* * * * * * * *

Six days after she was shot, Pam sat in a maroon chair in front of the Southside Assembly of God Church auditorium, where she had been invited by the mayor to speak. An index card-size bandage covered the still healing hole in her neck. She gazed at the half-moon sanctuary with the glaring white walls that blinded. She had never delivered a speech before, and she had joked to her husband that she would rather be shot again than speak publicly. He had finally convinced her that since she had been given a chance to share her thoughts, she should do it.

She looked into the eyes of the police officers and paramedics—her fellow members of the murder club—and thought of the day that had resulted in her being here. This church was less than a block from where Shoemake had opened fire. There were even bullet holes in this sanctuary from his shooting spree. Pam had seen a picture of Shoemake on the television news. He looked nearly sixty with a scraggly beard. She giggled. This is a killer? She was furious that she had been shot, but she couldn’t bring herself to hate Larry Shoemake.

She glanced at Mom and Dad in the audience. Upon seeing Shoemake’s picture, Dad insisted that he had worked with the man. He recalled his fellow employee as well dressed, nice, certainly no racist. Pam dismissed Dad’s claim as another case of fatherly embellishment. Days later, she learned he was right.

Pam looked at the auditorium swarming with hundreds of people gathered for this service to recognize both the victims of Shoemake’s rampage and those who helped save lives that day. She couldn’t believe that for her first public speech she would talk to such a large crowd, including such dignitaries as the mayor. Her palms grew moist. Her throat tightened.

She walked behind the podium and scanned the wooden pews. She locked eyes with Jay, who smiled at her. She glanced at her husband, who beamed with pride.

“I’m not a hero,” she began. “I just happened to be hit with a bullet. The heroes are the ones out there trying to save people—the police, the firemen, the paramedics.”

She spotted Police Chief Johnson, who had always been so helpful to her. Her hands trembled. She choked up.

“Don’t hate, and don’t take what happened to me and make it worse. Hate poisons everyone.”

Skin color, she told the crowd, should never keep us from doing what’s right. “I’m glad that race wasn’t a consideration with the white nurse, the white paramedics and the white doctors. We shouldn’t let sicknesses like Shoemake spread to the rest of us.”

She paused. “We can heal a city, and we can heal each other. There are far more of us than there are of them.”

The sanctuary echoed with the sounds of Amazing Grace, a hymn written by a captain of a slave ship who sought forgiveness. Pam, Jay and other audience members, black and white, intertwined fingers and swayed to the song.

* * * * * * * *

Four months after her speech, Pam stood in front of a bathroom mirror and gazed at her neck. The mark there was the one constant, the one thing that never changed. She had quit the murder club and was writing instead about county government. Before she was shot, witnessing violence on the police beat had left her numb. Since her injury, emotions from such violence pricked her like needles stabbing skin.

She cocked her head at different angles in the light, staring at the scar. Is the blemish any less noticeable today?

The mark on her neck was not the only defect that had been troubling her. She was striving to repair her relationship with her best friend, Genifer, resuming their daily lunches. Now she must combat her fears and learn to trust again.

Her inspection of the circular scar evoked memories of Larry Shoemake. Because he died in his own funeral pyre, there would be no arrest, no indictment, no trial. She would never raise her right hand to swear and tell the whole truth, never sit inside a wooden witness box, never describe what happened that day to a dozen jurors. She would never pass by a courtroom table where Shoemake was sitting and shoot him a bold stare that said he might be able to knock her down, he might be able to hurt her, but he could never defeat her.

She gently stroked the spot where the bullet had entered, her finger tracing the hole. This was her living proof of the bloody rampage, her medal in the flesh, reminding her that she had not only faced the monster of hate, she had survived. Tears twinkled on her cheeks. Streams cascaded down, down, down till their cleansing flows crossed the heart of her medal.

Epilogue:

Months after the shootout, Jay Hughes left The Clarion-Ledger and worked for a couple of newspapers before joining the Associated Press. In Oklahoma, he witnessed 11 executions by lethal injection. In 2007, he moved back to Pascagoula and led volunteers in rebuilding homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

“In June 2008, I married the former Martha Graham, who I met while rebuilding the house we now both call home,” Jay told me by e-mail. “I continue to moonlight as a freelance journalist, but recently took a day job working for the state as an employment counselor.”

Pam Berry worked at The Clarion-Ledger until 2006. She left to work at Jackson State University and currently serves as auxiliary enterprises marketing director.

Pam Berry

She reflected the other day on that fateful day:

“I’m not sure if the insights I gained happened all those years ago or just slowly seeped in as my life unfolded a bit more. Like others, I had survivor’s guilt and often wondered why I survived a gunshot wound to the neck when others had taken bullets to the leg and died. Back then, life for me was far more black and white. The shooting provided me with one of my first ‘shades of gray’ experiences. I came away with a lot of questions. Why had I lived? What was my true life’s purpose? What was I meant to gain from it? How could it have been prevented? What did I really feel about race?

“I think the hardest part of recovering back then was reading the letters Larry Shoemake had written to his friend. They were at times funny, warm and sad. They were also twisted and you could see him unravelling on the pages. Even though I was admittedly pissed at being shot, at times, I felt compassion for him. I wished he could have been reached before he unleashed his rage against the city that day. I wished someone had seen his pain and reached out to him.

“I didn’t talk much about Larry Shoemake back then. I didn’t really have a good grip on him as a villain. It wasn’t like we were standing face to face, and he gunned me down. I was a half mile away and took a stray bullet being randomly fired from a gun wielded by a man who was likely insane.

“I caught glimpses of his face in photos from the hospital bed afterwards and from the newspaper. I still remember his eyes and wild, bushy white hair. I had nightmares about him crouching in bushes, behind buildings, in closets. And then I moved on.

“Eventually, the hair on the back of my neck stopped standing up when I drove past Ellis and Highway 80. I go through the area almost weekly now and rarely even think about what happened so long ago.

“What I have been left with is a deeper faith in God that was strengthened because that was the first time it had really been tested.

“You know, Jerry, my story of religion and faith in Mississippi — part of the Bible Belt — is not unique. I was raised in the Baptist church and spent the bulk of my childhood traveling back and forth from Jackson to Yazoo County to attend worship service, choir rehearsal, Bible study and myriad other church functions. I was baptized in the muddy pond across the street from the church near a cow pasture. I can recite verses, know gospel hymns and just about every prayer there is to pray. But until that day I was shot, my belief system, my faith, had never been tested. Standing there amidst strangers and having to rely on their compassion to survive forced me to really embrace what I believe.

“I was admittedly scared and wondering what would happen next. I wanted to live. But I also was buoyed by an overwhelming sense of calmness and peace that no matter what happened – whether I lived or died – I was truly in God’s hands and the people he placed in my path.

“I remember the ER physician sharing that had I moved an inch to the left or the right when the bullet struck me, I would have died. the bullet missed the main artery in my neck by an inch. But what if the nurse (who was white) that took over at the hotel lobby had not been there when she did? She was there with a church convention and just happened to be walking in the lobby at the exact time I was walking through the door. A stranger, who clutched my bloodied neck and refused to leave me, even when I was in the capable hands of the paramedics when they arrived. She looked to her husband, told him she wasn’t leaving me and climbed right in the back of the ambulance for the trip to the hospital.

“Now that I am older, I see the hand of God in all that happened that day. That feeling of being in God’s protective embrace has never left me. It has made me more trusting of God’s plan in my life — through the good and the bad.

“So now, I’m living my life and trying to live it in a way that honors the gift I was given that day — the second chance. Not a perfect life, but one that I’m proud of.

“I’m a mother now. I have two children. Went through a divorce, but recently remarried someone whose personal faith in God makes me want to be a better person every day. I think I’m a more relaxed person now. Laugh easier. Love harder. I have less things to prove and a greater appreciation of the simple things in life. I’m still not obsessed with race, but know that as a woman of color it is ever pervasive in my life. I deal with it when it needs to be dealt with. I try to understand those who are different and educate.

“I don’t see that day as a defining moment, although it was important, I think there will be many others before it’s all over. I see it as just part of the ongoing tale that is still being written.”

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About The Author

Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., runs Journey to Justice, a blog that explores the intersection of justice and culture in this place we call the United States​. His work has helped put four Klansmen behind bars, including the assassin of NAACP leader Medgar Evers in 1963 and the man who orchestrated the Klan’s 1964 killings of three civil rights workers. His latest stories have helped lead to the arrest of serial killer suspect Felix Vail — the last known person seen with three women. Mitchell, a 2009 MacArthur fellow, is writing a book on cold cases from the civil rights era.